When Niantic rebooted Ingress as Ingress Prime back in November, it was after a year of work effectively porting the classic MMOARPG to Pokemon Go’s tech, buffing the graphics, and streaming the UI in an attempt to both appeal to noobs and make cheating much harder. But it wasn’t exactly a new game: Players kept their old accounts and ranks, and many gamers just looked at it as a graphics upgrade than as a reboot.

Unfortunately, the last two months have been rocky indeed. There’s a whole separate Reddit dedicated just to feedback for Prime, as players complain about battery use, syncing, location bugs, visibility, illegible UI components, and on and on. In fact, early on the complaints were so loud that Niantic gave in and put up an original-flavor version of the client, Scanner [REDACTED], to cater to those who preferred the old version.

The hate towards Prime is unwarranted and simply a knee-jerk reaction to change.

I’m a Founder, so I’ve been playing Ingress since early beta on and off. I love the game. But I’m a slow leveler, and I’m only 9 now so I don’t have OPR privileges.

I’ve been using the Prime app since it launched on the iPhone and I haven’t had a single problem with it. Not a single one. Not a single bug. I’ve put in dozens of hours with Prime now (almost 10 now, w00t!) and it works better than the old app, hands-down. The gameplay is faster, the UI is snappier, you only need one hand to rotate the map….

I’ve had no reason to install Redacted. If I had OPR privileges, sure, I’d have both installed. But for me, now, Prime works great.

The hate towards Prime is simply an expression of the reactionary fear of change, and it’s being used as a focal point for all those disaffected with Niantic.

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1 year ago

Reader

derMoge

Its up to everyone how he or she wants to play the game. And I do respect the way you decide to play it.
BUT: For people that play more then just the 5-10min a week and want to lvlup a bit fast by going for maxfields and taking down enemy farms – I say for those the “new” prime scanner doesn’t work good. ;-)

I tried the prime scanner after my recursion and switch back to redacted very fast. (that was shortly before the anniversary event kicked off)
Since then I opened prime only a few times, just to close it again immediatly

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1 year ago

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Roy Adams (roytoo)

I’m also a founder. (I made it to L16 before recursing recently. I’m roytoo in game if you want to verify.)

I’ve had an overall good experience with Prime as well and I have been using it as my main way of playing (~1 hour a week) since it came out.

Many of the user experience (UX) changes are significant improvements once you play a little to get accustomed to them.

I’ve had two primary issues with only the first requiring that I open Redacted to resolve:
1. Twice Prime has shown me no available links when I know some are available. Both times I was doing carefully planned layered fielding and knew I had another link. Restarting Prime didn’t resolve the issue so I opened Redacted to throw the link.

2.Sporadically I have a bug with inventory management getting stuck and not showing the Manage button. I’ve always been able to quickly resolve by closing and reopening Prime.

My main UX gripes (I don’t consider these as bugs since they are pretty obviously deliberate design decisions):
1. The hack notifications block or interrupt actions which slows down “quick hacking”. Redacted has a smoother and more reliable “tap to dismiss” workflow.

2. The post link animation can’t be dismissed by tapping. I could do without watching a link or field form each time. 😉 (I think I saw that allowing tap dismissal is under consideration.)

Overall, Prime is good to me and even caused a little good nostalgia for the early closed beta bugginess of Ingress. 😀

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1 year ago

Reader

Roy Adams (roytoo)

Odd, per the 2.14 update notes the Android back button should dismiss the animation. I’ll have to ensure I try today to confirm.